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Black Lives Matter protesters in London, UK – June, 2020. Photo: Joao Daniel Pereira / Shutterstock.com
Since mid-March, Adam Habib, the new director of SOAS, University of London, has been on leave while under investigation “in the context of anti-Blackness as a structural issue in SOAS.” SOAS launched the investigation after Habib, a South African man of Indian descent, casually used an anti-Black racial slur during a student meeting in response to a question about accountability for SOAS professors who use the term in class.
After being criticized for his own repetition of the term, Habib doubled down, citing his identity as an African man and invoking his history as a former anti-Apartheid activist in South Africa. Yet Habib’s response belies his checkered past of weaponizing identity politics for repressive means. During his tenure as the Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, he frequently invoked his status as an ant
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The Satanic Verses, thirty years on Submitted by AWL on 10 October, 2018 - 11:31
Author: Matt Cooper
The Satanic Verses.
Rushdie’s sprawling novel defies summary: interlinking stories meld scurrilous fantasies, dark humour and cutting political satire directed not only at Islam, but British racism and Indian immigrants’ attempts to adapt. It is an honest attempt to deal with the warping pressures of racism, religion and cultural dislocation.
When it was published in September 1988 there was no spontaneous grassroots opposition. According to Kenan Malik in From Fatwa to Jihad, one early move against the book was in India, where pressure from Jammat-e-Islami led to the book being banned there in October. (Jammat is an Islamist organisation with the main goal of bringing in Islamic states in Pakistan and Bangladesh.)